Fall 2012
Teaching Food and Sustainability
Lisa Armstrong (Study of Women & Gender)
As an interdisciplinary field about a familiar life necessity, teaching about food and food systems can open creative ways of learning about the social sciences, the sciences and the humanities. This teaching circle will allow participants to explore the challenges and possibilities of drawing on unfamiliar fields connected to food issues to enrich their courses or to develop a new course.
The teaching circle will meet 2-3 times per semester over dinner to workshop a range of topics, including questions we're facing in our classrooms, ways our courses can cover cross-disciplinary materials with rigor and care, and developing discrete projects in our courses that illuminate course readings. The circle is open to anyone who has an interest in joining, whether you are teaching about food in your classes, want to develop a food-related component to an existing course, or want to create a new course.
Psychology Assessment
Patty DiBartolo (Psychology)
Measuring student learning is a daunting task. What are the possible concerns and opportunities emerging from a department's attempts to capture student knowledge within its discipline? This Teaching Circle includes faculty from the departments of Education and Psychology as well as staff from Institutional Research who are working to develop a tool assessing disciplinary knowledge, especially related to research methods, within Psychology student majors. The pilot tool we created, and are continuing to hone, is an open-ended assessment that measures transfer and application of disciplinary knowledge aligned with our collective learning goals. At our meetings, we discuss the complexities and promising directions of our work as we attempt to address the essential question of how best to measure what our students know.
Workshop Physics
Gary Felder (Physics)
Over the next two years Smith physics will be doing away with separate labs and lectures in introductory physics, moving to an integrated model where students go back and forth between doing experiments, discussing the results, and solving problems. We will discuss our plans for making this transition and the open questions we are still working on in that process.
Design Thinking
Borjana Mikic (Engineering)
This group of faculty and staff from wide-ranging disciplines meets regularly to discuss the ways in which we develop 'design thinking' in our students; that is, the application of processes and methodologies associated with design to identifying, framing and solving problems (or creating experiences) in any domain or realm.
Practice, Progress, Performance
Judith Gordon (Music)
This Teaching Circle will focus on how the Performing Arts are being and may best be taught in a Liberal Arts environment. It will include discussion of shared preoccupations in teaching what is both ineffable and attainable. It will explore how we transform what many students have done 'for fun' into a serious and nourishing part of their curriculum.
Multi-Disciplinary Discussions to Develop Inquiry Based Introductory Science Courses
Donna Lello
HHMI has funded Smith to develop three new inquiry-based introductory science courses. These courses are designed as an experiment to test a model that uses participation in authentic research to engage students in the sciences. All three courses are multidisciplinary. This teaching circle continues a Smith science community conversation about: the challenge of balancing knowledge acquisition with understanding process and the design of inquiry; ways to alter assessment to reflect the different skill set; ways to involve faculty from multiple departments and re-distribute teaching responsibilities; and the potential for integrating these courses with the existing curriculum and major requirements (e.g., in Biology, Chemistry, Geology, Physics, Mathematics).
Spring 2012
Knowledge Forum - Al Rudnitsky (Education & Child Study) & Glenn Ellis (Engineering)
The Knowledge Forum teaching circle consists of faculty who are exploring ways to incorporate student collaboration, extended discourse about ideas, and idea improvement into their courses. Many of the faculty are using Knowledge Forum, a web-based computer program that supports collaborative learning. How to use this tool effectively and assess its impact on learning in a wide variety of disciplines and types of courses is at the center of the teaching circle's work.
Participants:
Patricia DiBartolo
Kevin Shea
Lauren Duncan
Roisin O'Sullivan
Charles Staelin
Borjana Mikic
Bosiljka Glumac
Judith Cardell
Susan Voss
Elizabeth Jamieson
Floyd Cheung
Psychology Assessment - Patty DiBartolo (Psychology)
Measuring student learning is a daunting task. What are the possible concerns and opportunities emerging from a department's attempts to capture student knowledge within its discipline? This Teaching Circle includes faculty from the departments of Education and Psychology as well as staff from Institutional Research who are working to develop a tool assessing disciplinary knowledge, especially related to research methods, within Psychology student majors. The pilot tool we created, and are continuing to hone, is an open-ended assessment that measures transfer and application of disciplinary knowledge aligned with our collective learning goals. At our meetings, we discuss the complexities and promising directions of our work as we attempt to address the essential question of how best to measure what our students know.
Participants:
Minh Ly
Al Rudnitsky
Lauren Duncan
Beth Powell
Workshop Physics - Gary Felder (Physics)
Over the next two years Smith physics will be doing away with separate labs and lectures in introductory physics, moving to an integrated model where students go back and forth between doing experiments, discussing the results, and solving problems. We will discuss our plans for making this transition
and the open questions we are still working on in that process.
Participants:
Nat Fortune
Joyce Fortune
Doreen Weinberger
Nalini Easwar
Travis Norsen
Dana Parsons
Teaching from the Archives - Susan Van Dyne (Women & Gender Studies)
The teaching circle is meant for those who have used the archives before for courses and want to learn more, and for those who think they might want to, but suffer from archiveaphobia. We will share pedagogical strategies and resources on topics like these:
- How to make the most of an orientation to the archives for your students
- How to use the archives at different class levels
- What is online at the SSC or the College Archives - what is in a finding aid, a subject guide?
- How to design a one-class assignment
- How to scaffold a longer research experience
- How to analyze photographs, oral histories (online teaching aids for archival documents)
- How to find the collection(s) that works for your courses
We will include (probably in a late afternoon meeting) a chance to browse collections the archivists have identified that might match your teaching interests.
Participants:
Martha Ackelsberg
Carrie Baker
Riche' Barnes
Maida Goodwin
Jina Kim
Pamela Petro
Sherrill Redmon
Andrea Stone
Nanci Young
Sujane Wu
Fall 2011
Knowledge Forum - Al Rudnitsky (Education & Child Study) & Glenn Ellis (Engineering)
Participants:
Patricia DiBartolo
Kevin Shea
Lauren Duncan
Roisin O'Sullivan
Charles Staelin
Borjana Mikic
Bosiljka Glumac
Judith Cardell
Susan Voss
Elizabeth Jamieson
Floyd Cheung
Psychology Assessment - Patty DiBartolo (Psychology)
Participants:
Minh Ly
Al Rudnitsky
Lauren Duncan
Bill Peterson
Beth Powell
Teaching from the Archives - Susan Van Dyne (Women & Gender Studies)
Participants:
Kelly Anderson
Andrea Stone
Chris Shelton
Helene Visentin
Janie Van Pee
Jennifer Hall-Witt
Joyce Follett
Justin Cammy
Lester Tome
Maida Goodwin
Michele Wick
Nanci Young
Rick Millington
Rosetta Cohen
Sara Eddy
Susan Etheredge
Vanessa Adel
Design Thinking - Borjana Mikic (Engineering)
Participants:
Susannah Howe
Drew Guswa
Ann Leone
Reid Bertone Johnson
Roger Bloom
Jim Middlebrook
Frazer Ward
Fraser Stables
Alex Keller
Eitan Mendelowitz
Susan Etheredge
Lynn Yamamoto
John Gibson
Nina Antonetti
Denise McKahn
Diversity - Dawn Fulton (French Studies)
Participants:
Daphne Lamothe
Riché Barnes
Rick Millington
Kevin Quashie
Lynne Yamamoto
Susan Levin
Donna Riley
Andrea Stone
Workshop Physics - Gary Felder (Physics)
Participants:
Nat Fortune
Joyce Fortune
Doreen Weinberger
Nalini Easwar
Travis Norsen
Dana Parsons
Spring 2011
Teaching from the Archives - Susan Van Dyne (Women & Gender Studies)
Diversity - Dawn Fulton (French Studies)
Design Thinking - Borjana Mikic (Engineering)
Fall 2010
Teaching from the Archives - Susan Van Dyne (Women & Gender Studies)
Diversity - Dawn Fulton (French Studies)
Foreign Languages - Abdelkader Berrahmoun (Middle East Studies)
